May 2019 – Volume 23, Number 1
Corpus Linguistics for English Teachers, New Tools,
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| Author: | Eric Friginal (2018) |  |
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| Publisher: | Routledge: New York | ||
| Pages | ISBN | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 349 pages | 978-1-138-12309-0 (paper) | $46.70 USD | |
Corpus Linguistics for English Teachers, New Tools, Online Resources, and Classroom Activities by Eric Friginal is a textbook for teachers and practitioners in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), English as a second language (ESL), English as a foreign language (EFL), and graduate students in applied linguistics. This book can be beneficial for both novice and experienced English language teachers who can benefit from the new tools, resources, and sample lessons that are introduced. The book includes three parts: “Corpus Linguistics for English Teachers: Overview, Definition, and Scope,” “Tools, Corpora, and Online Resources,” and “Corpus-Based Lessons and Activities in the Classroom.” The first part of the book consists of three sections (A1, A2, A3), the second part consists of three sections (B1, B2, B3), and the third part consists of four sections (C1, C2, C3, C4). Eric Friginal presents corpus-based materials and tools that he developed with former students and collaborators. He presents different applications of corpus linguistics (CL) in language teaching and learning, such as corpus tools and corpus websites. He also proposes different ways to integrate these tools in classroom activities or homework tasks.
In the first part, “Corpus Linguistics for English Teachers: Overview, Definition, and Scope,” Friginal provides readers with a useful overview of key concepts in CL. In this part, he introduces 11 published textbooks related to corpora use in the language classroom over the last 10 years. These textbooks can help readers in creating classroom activities and designing lesson plans. Friginal also presents three primary instructional approaches that have been associated with corpus tools in language teaching: educational/instructional technology-based learning, computer-assisted learning, and data-driven learning (DDL) instruction. In the last section of this part, he provides various tools and websites for analyzing and visualizing corpus-based data. He also introduces sample activities to better illustrate how teachers can use these tools and websites in their language classrooms.
The second part of the book, “Tools, Corpora, and Online Resources” provides a section with a concise list of currently and publicly available large-scale corpora and databases such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). One of the highlights of this section is Friginal’s description of each corpus, examples of well-known studies that used various corpora including COCA and MICASE, and potential future studies that can be done using the mentioned corpora. In the second section, the author explains the corpus collection process in three steps: preparation and pre-collection, corpus collection, and publishing and sharing. In the third section of this part, he provides an annotated bibliography of CL research studies that have been published since 2010 on the following topics: CL in the classroom, CL and writing, CL and spoken learner data.
The last part of the book is titled “Corpus-Based Lessons and Activities in the Classroom” and contains four sections: “Developing Corpus-Based Lessons and Activities,” “Corpus Linguistics and Vocabulary Instruction,” “Corpus Linguistics and Grammar Instruction,” and “Corpus Linguistics and Teaching Spoken/Written Discourse.” The first section describes case studies of Friginal’s experience in developing corpus-based lessons and activities for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses, specifically, a university-level writing course for students of forestry in the United States. In the second section, he introduces corpus-based dictionaries and academic word lists, along with some explanations to clarify the main contribution of CL in vocabulary instruction. The author presents three corpus-based vocabulary instruction lesson plans. Each lesson starts with a background, notes or recommendations for teachers to provide more insight into the proposed activities, related literature, and a description of the procedures and activities using corpus tools. In the third section, which is focused on grammar instruction by using corpus-based tools and materials, Friginal provides descriptions for corpus-based grammar books and presents six corpus-based lesson plans for grammar instruction. In the last section, he begins by emphasizing and demonstrating the importance of register variation (i.e., lexical and grammatical differences in written and spoken English) in teaching. He also presents four corpus-based lesson plans focused on academic spoken and written discourse.
Overall, the major strength of Corpus Linguistics for English Teachers, New Tools, Online Resources, and Classroom Activities lies in its presentation of a variety of tools, websites, and corpora, as well as ways to incorporate them in a classroom, including CL-based activities. This is in accordance with Friginal’s claim that the book is designed for English teachers with a limited background in CL and CL courses. The book is an especially valuable resource for material developers and graduate students focusing on teaching and research. The lesson plans and activities in the last part are well-described and therefore ready for teachers to implement. One of the particularly useful parts of the book is the last part that includes Friginal’s interviews with teachers who have implemented CL in the classroom, thereby lending a credible perspective to this part. Equally useful is the discussion of the challenges of implementing corpus-based lessons, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the activities provided within the lesson plans.
On the other hand, the theoretical aspects (e.g., normalized frequency, linguistic parsing, corpus annotation) of the first two parts might be somewhat challenging and possibly overwhelming for teachers with a limited background in CL, as they may have not done any research using corpus linguistics. Also, it would have been beneficial if Friginal had included interviews with students regarding their reaction to CL approaches and activities. Teachers and material developers could benefit from students’ reactions to corpus-based activities to modify materials and activities to be more effective in the classroom. Moreover, it would have been beneficial if he had provided a sample handout (e.g., a student handout about starting computer-based DDL activity for the first time) for students who have never used these tools in classrooms, or if he had provided ways for teachers to familiarize students with CL tools.
Overall, I believe that this book is unquestionably one that should lie within easy reach of those interested in CL and its implications for language pedagogy because of its variety of topics related to CL and CL applications.
Reviewed by
Fatemeh Bordbarjavidi
Iowa State University
<bordbarf
iastate.edu>
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